


in every branch

by Inchoatl



Category: Kidd Commander (Webcomic)
Genre: Body Horror but it's an android so it's ok?, Gen, Hallucinations - or are they?, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, look ulrich's had a time of it ok?, so vague as to be indecipherable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27640936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inchoatl/pseuds/Inchoatl
Summary: Ulrich - At different times, in different places.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	in every branch

Backstage is many things for Ulrich. It is his war room, his armoury. It is where he prepares his tricks and orders his mind, lining up everything for the show ahead. It is something almost approaching safe. It is not a place where he welcomes strangers.

“Fuck, I'm sorry ok!?” The intruder spits out, fearful and angry with the barrel of a gun jammed into the small of his back. Average height, average build, brown hair, no real defining features. Average is dangerous in a city that turned on the new and the interesting. Average doesn't survive in Roulette City under normal circumstances. Ulrich has him pushed up against a wall as he pats him down for concealed weapons. “All I wanted was to ask for an autograph! This is how you treat your fans?”

“No,” Ulrich replies evenly, even though his heart is pounding. “My fans have the decency to refrain from invading my personal quarters. It is, however, how I treat people intent on putting me in danger.”

“I'm not-” The man begins protesting just as Ulrich reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out an envelope.

“Try again.”

It's incredible how the sense of a person can go from angry to desperate, all without moving a single muscle. The energy is still there, the tensing of the muscles just the same as before, except the focus has shifted from person to place, and that place is _away_.

“It's...” the man licks his lips nervously, “it's just a job offer. That's all it is, honest.”

“No it isn't,” Ulrich says tiredly before slipping the envelope back into the man's pocket. “How long have you been in town?”

“Ummmm, six months, give or take.”

It sounds like the truth, and Ulrich wishes he could be sure, he really really does, but he can't afford any silverspeak. Not here, not now. He just needs a a few more days, and then... And then...

“ _Schiesse_ ,” Ulrich says tiredly as he withdraws his pistol from the man's back, though he doesn't holster it. “All right, here is what you need to do. You need to leave Roulette City tonight, and you need to run. Run as far as you can and pray that you aren't worth enough for House Tyche to bother spending resources hunting you down.” 

The man visibly tenses at that. “I don't know what you're-”

“Tyche's perfume is very distinctive,” Ulrich cuts him off as he backs away. “And even if that were not the case, you are not the first person who has approached me on Tyche's behalf and I do not believe you will be the last. ” Ulrich opens one of the small drawers in the vanity furthest from the door and roots around it briefly by feel before pulling out a plastic card. “When Tyche told you to deliver that letter, he was not giving you some sort of final chance. He was getting rid of something he no longer had use for. Fortuna does not abide poachers.”

Ulrich flicks the card over, and it bounces off the man's chest and drops to the floor.

“Isolated card. There should be enough money on there to get out of town,” Ulrich says. “Do it before Tyche notices and run.” 

The man looks down at what might be his best ticket out of town, and then back up at Ulrich. He licks his lips, hands jittering.

Average doesn't survive in Roulette City. Desperation doesn't survive much better, but that doesn't stop people from trying. The man charges and Ulrich, contrary to his every expectation, does not shoot him. Ulrich has time for a single moment of utter incomprehension before his attacker grabs him and slams his head against the vanity. Ulrich's mind goes white with pain, and he can't pull away, can't do much of anything before he feels a rag pressed to his face and a cloying, sweet scent crawls into his sinuses.

Panic. Dull lines of fear try to spur muscle, but it is too little, too late, and everything drowns in the chloroform tide.

And just as suddenly, the sickly sweet blanket of chloroform is gone. The panic, however, is not, and Ulrich finds himself shooting off his bed on the Lucky Noon. He bounces once, twice, and then splutters as he heaves for breath and gets a faceful of petals for his troubles. Petals that, a distant part of his mind points out, probably aren't real.

“You're getting soft,” Bel says as she looks down at him, fond exasperation buried deep in the frown threatening to drop her cigarette from her lips.

“You've always thought I'm soft,” Ulrich replies as he lies on the floor, trying to get his heart rate under control.

Bel doesn't reply, and Ulrich takes more deep breaths as old memories click into place. Adam. The man's name had been Adam. Ulrich hadn't found out the man's name until three days after he'd killed him.

Back then Ulrich hadn't faltered and had put three bullets into Adam before he'd managed to cross half the dressing room. The whole incident had been ruled self-defense, with the chloroformed rag taking pride of place among the evidence. House Tyche apologized for allowing a crazed kidnapper to take advantage of their family name and pressed no charges. House Fortuna accepted the apology. Life in Roulette City continued on. 

Ulrich looks up. Bel's still frowning, but now she's frowning at the other bed in the room, where Phineas usually sleeps.

At length Ulrich says, “I think it'll be worth it.”

“Yeah, well...” Bel takes a deep drag of her cigarette and blows the smoke out forcefully. “You said the same thing about me.”

* * *

It's the first morning out from Last Chance and Ulrich still doesn't know where they're going. He suspects he knows what sort of answer he'd get if he asked Phineas, but so long as he doesn't actually hear the words “The sun!” he can cultivate what remaining hope he has like a stunted little bonsai. A stunted little bonsai recently transplanted into a bed of cheerfully crackling embers.

It's early yet, the darkness not yet burning away to a new dawn, but his dreams have made it perfectly clear to Ulrich that returning to sleep is not an option. That suits him just fine. He needs to greet the dawn anyways, but first there's something even more important he needs to take care of.

“Of all the things she could have stolen...” Ulrich murmurs as he pulls a small glass lotus from his lapel.

“You do have a habit of ending up at the side of louder, flashier women.”

Ulrich stiffens, and then takes a steadying breath. He's half tempted to keep quiet. He knows Lucky Noon has some level of sentience and talking to thin air is probably not the best way to make a first impression. On the other hand, he's going to be on this boat for who knows how long. It's only a matter of time before they notice something's up.

“Rook-” Ulrich begins slowly, only for Bel to cut him off immediately.

“I said louder and flashier. I didn't say anything about being worth even a fraction of your time,” Bel snorts, disdain rolling off her like a palpable aura. “You know damn well I'm not talking about her.”

Ulrich sets the flower down and pulls out the tools he brought with him from the bedroom. He has many tricks, and a great deal of them revolve around easily accessing bits of subspace while people are looking the other way. This is not one of them. This is a lock in the shape of a box, and the treasure in this box is very, _very_ precious.

“Third time's the charm?” Ulrich says, smiling as he finishes a few deft movements and feels the pull of subspace mechanisms, and watches a real lotus unfold into existence just above its glass counterpart. Hiding a flower in a flower. A priceless treasure hidden in plain sight under the guise of a mere bauble. Risking something irreplaceable by putting it on open display. Aesthetic is important. That said, it also led to him having to track down Rook to a chunk of nothing in the middle of the desert, so maybe there was something to be said about discretion on occasion.

It takes five seconds of unresponsive silence for Ulrich to stop what he's doing and actually look for Bel. She's standing just behind his left shoulder and he feels himself freeze. Ulrich has never liked having people standing at his back, and oddly persistent hallucinations are no exception. He resists the urge to touch her and see if she feels solid. He needs more information. He's flying blind, and he can't afford to shy away when he's already spent far too long making important decisions with information he doesn't have. Instead, he follows her gaze to the flower resting in between his cupped hands.

“She wasn't completely wrong, even if she had no idea what she was talking about,” Bel says, and it takes Ulrich a moment to realize she's talking about Rook again. She's wearing her sad smile. It's the smile that makes her look like she wants to thread barbed wire through someone's circulatory system an inch at a time. Bel has fury in the little pocket of her heart where most people keep misery. “My family really did break you in all the right places.”

* * *

The truth of the matter is that traveling with a Commander means getting into fights. Getting into fights means getting hurt, and while the squishy human members are more prone to receiving debilitating injuries at the worst possible moments, they are also capable of healing both via magic and simply getting bed rest, usually both in succession. Agatha on the other hand requires repairs, and while she ~~needs~~ would prefer to do all the repairs herself, she isn't always in a position to do so. Ulrich is the only person aboard Lucky Noon who knows their way around circuits.

“I can do it by feel,” Agatha says as she quietly sizzles in her maintenance harness just off of Noon's core.

“I know you can,” Ulrich says as he deliberately orders his tools on a side-table, a mechanic's _mise_ all set to go. “I'm sure you could get it with enough trial and error. Unfortunately we don't currently have the extra parts we need for the error part of that equation.”

“Lucky Noon-”

“Has made it pretty clear that hooking up Noon-made parts to you is a bad idea, little sister,” Lucky Noon says, suddenly there, and it's only long familiarity and the focus required of repairs that keeps Ulrich from jumping. “If he was just slapping on a peg leg with some duct tape, that'd be fine, but as far as I can tell connecting any kind of machinery I manifest to you means connecting to it on a core level.”

Agatha has Agatha Frown #23 at the ready. It looks like all her other frowns. It's the one you have to read a stubborn pout into. Ulrich and Lucky Noon are very familiar with Agatha Frown #23.

“You've done that before,” She says, sullen.

“I haven't, actually,” Noon says. “When we first met, that was just talking. I was still me, you were still you. I let you into my living room, so to speak. But for what you need, I think you'd have to wind me _through_ you, and that...” Noon grimaces.

“If I touched you, could you relay me images?” Agatha asks, quietly desperate. 

Sometimes freedom was a cruel joke. Having parts switched out by ~~Monty~~ other people used to be easy, but now she knows it was never easy. She just never had a choice. Now she does, just in time to lose both her eyes because she'd been _stupid_ and hadn't thought to _protect her face_ -

Sometimes freedom feels like recovering just enough to properly hurt again.

“Could do...” Noon says hesitantly. “But for us, talking stone-to-stone is an all-or-nothing process. I don't think I can jury rig you a live feed, not unless I _was_ your eyes, and then we're back to square one. And even if we both felt like attempting surgery by way of stop-motion, your body kind of... twitches?”

Agatha stares at them. Rather, she points her face in the direction of their voice and tries to fix them with her best 'Are you shitting me?' stare. It is a stare that is made infinitely more creepy due to the fact that she has a pair of gently sparking holes where her eyes are supposed to be. Lucky Noon notes it down as Agatha Stare #216 and hopes very much that they won't have to see it again. 

“Sorry, no idea why it happens,” Noon says apologetically, holding up their hands in mock surrender. “Starships are weird, and you're completely new. Could be a bunch of different things, but right now all I know is that it does happen, and it'd make trying to do repairs a real pain.

“I'm happy to let you do repairs yourself, but you need your eyes to do that safely,” Ulrich says, readying a coil of wiring. “I can stop, if you want...”

“Do it.”

Ulrich looks up at Agatha and sees discomfort and determination. He doesn't see it in her face, because her face is very carefully blank. He sees it in her, because like calls to like and he's spent years looking in the mirror and seeing that same mix of emotions staring back at him. 

“Ok.”

He reaches up to her face and his hand brushes-

_...Scales..._

Ulrich jerks his hand back and just hears at the edges of his mounting panic Agatha asking, “What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” Ulrich lies, and then continues talking before either Agatha or Noon can call him on it. “I think I mentioned I have family who are androids. I occasionally helped them with maintenance.”

“Why didn't they go to a specialist?”

“Sometimes... sometimes people prefer to keep things in the family,” Ulrich says as he reaches up and eases what's left of the shattered lens that used to be Agatha's left eye out of its socket, quickly blowing lingering crystal dust out of the hole and inspecting the housing before slotting in the replacement eye. “I was never comfortable with it then, and I am not comfortable with it now.”

“If you don't like it...” Agatha asks, as Ulrich moves to her right eye.

“Sometimes there are things that need to be done,” Ulrich says simply as he removes her right eye and grimaces at what he sees. A spine had punched clean through Agatha's lens and damaged the housing behind it. The new eye would probably sit fine, but the connection port was damaged.

“This... fixing people. It is not something I believe anybody should be comfortable doing,” Ulrich says as he pries out the spine and prepares the materials he needs for a wire splice. “Nobody should be comfortable being so close... so... ach-” 

Ulrich exhales, his frustration directed as much at the difficulty of the splice as it is at his lack of words. For all his frustration, the work is done quite quickly, and it isn't more than a minute before he's slotting Agatha's right eye into place.

“Your vision might be a bit shaky in the right one,” Ulrich says as he spools his wire, Agatha testing her new eyes behind him. “The housing can still hold it, but it's damaged and there might be movement.”

“I can see,” Agatha says, forthright.

“Glad to hear it, _Sternchen_ ,” Ulrich says, a small smile on his face.

“Glad. But not comfortable,” Agatha says, though there is a question in her voice.

Ulrich looks over at Noon, and then at the ship all around them, and then to Agatha, fresh eyed and still heavily damaged, hanging in her harness.

“Changing people shouldn't be comfortable.”

* * *

_We were never going to make it out._

_Making it out was never the point._

What is a daughter who doesn't want to follow in her family's footsteps? What is a daughter who would throw away a legacy like so much trash just because she _wants_? 

A heritage is something that cannot be built by any one person. A family is giants standing on the shoulders of giants standing on the shoulders of giants, all the way back until memory blurs and deeds become myth, a tower of accomplishments in the shape of people disappearing down into the mists of ages.

A girl is one life. A girl is _One. Life_. How can you calculate the loss when someone throws away the work of _generations_? How can a girl who would throw away everything her family has worked for be considered as anything but _traitor_? 

_I can't believe their **fucking** arrogance. Thinking that they could use us as leashes for each other..._

_It worked, didn't it? For fifteen years. Two crabs, and they might as well have thrown away any pretense of a bucket. We never tried..._

_We can now. We aren't done yet. We can still make them **bleed**._

Others have come before. Others have made sacrifices. Strong strains must be guarded. There will always be ways to ensure that the ends justify the means. A heritage is an endless parade of hostages, a line of beloved ghosts held at knifepoint to browbeat the living into _doing as they're told._

Murder has a long history securing power for those willing to do whatever it takes to haul themselves up on the backs of others. It's a venerable tradition that continues to the present day, even in the more civilized corners of the world. Especially in the more civilized corners of the world. It doesn't even need something so gauche as a bodycount anymore, per se. You don't need to kill someone to utterly unmake them. Sometimes, all you need is discipline.

Murder the soul. Keep the face, keep the name. Secure the legacy.

Plants have been murdering each other for marginal gains long before we first crawled up out of the sea, and Fortuna learned from the best. And yet there remains that old truth that everyone would sooner forget...

No matter who you are, no matter how good you are, sometimes your best isn't good enough.

_You'd trade all those lives for one person?_

_Every time._

* * *

Phineas says that Lucky Noon smells like home because of course she does and of course they do. Perhaps some day Noon will smell like home for Ulrich as well. The thought terrifies him in a way wholly unlike normal fear for how much it hurts. There is a part of Ulrich, a very tiny, very hidden, very guarded part that wants desperately for Lucky Noon to smell like home for him. He is terrified of how desperately he wants, terrified that maybe one day he will get his wish, and his heart aches that terror, even hidden, is the coin with which he repays their love.

For now, Lucky Noon smells of fresh timber and sawdust, new daubed tar and old hempen rope and rust spotted metal that is still holding strong. On occasion, Lucky Noon will smell like freshly reaped hay and newly tilled earth, farm scent carried in on the breeze even though they're miles in the air, far from any earth or greenery. 

Lucky Noon does not yet smell like home.

**Author's Note:**

> I was going somewhere with this, I swear. Then I lost the plot, so now all you get are a bunch of disjointed snippets.


End file.
